1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to storage system environments and, more specifically, to a storage architecture of a storage system environment.
2. Background Information
A storage system environment may include a server configured to provide storage service relating to the organization of data on a storage array of writable persistent storage media, such as disks. The storage system environment may employ a storage architecture that enables the server to serve the data from the storage array in file system and block formats with high reliability and integrity through the use of data protection and management techniques, such as tiered storage, persistent point-in-time read-only images of the data, and/or Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks (RAID) implementations. However, access to the data stored on the disks may require the server to perform frequent input/output (I/O) operations over one or more internal system buses to the storage array, which could adversely impact performance of the storage architecture.
Prior attempts to improve performance of the storage architecture included the use of solid-state storage media, such as flash storage devices, to serve data stored on the server. Although the use of such storage may improve the access performance to the data, flash devices generally have limited storage capacity and a high cost per terabyte of storage (compared to disks). In addition, the flash devices generally have no credible capability to protect and/or manage the data at large scale. Accordingly, protection of data stored on the server flash storage is often realized through techniques such as server replication, i.e., replication of the data among a plurality of servers. Yet, server replication may also require frequent data exchanges between the flash devices and main memory of the server over one or more system buses, resulting in large amounts of data traffic over the buses prior to forwarding of the traffic to the other servers. Such data traffic typically consumes large amounts of memory bandwidth, thereby adversely impacting performance of the storage architecture.